scholarly journals Disagreement or Badmouthing? The Role of Expressive Discourse in Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-318
Author(s):  
Michael Hannon

A striking feature of political discourse is how prone we are to disagree. Political opponents will even give different answers to factual questions, which suggests that opposing parties cannot agree on facts any more than they can on values. This impression is widespread and supported by survey data. This chapter will argue, however, that the extent and depth of political disagreement is largely overstated. Many political disagreements are merely illusory. This claim has several important upshots. The implications of this idea for theories about voter misinformation, motivated reasoning, deliberative democracy, and a number of other issues are explored.

Author(s):  
George Pattison

A Rhetorics of the Word is the second volume of a three-part philosophy of Christian life. It approaches Christian life as expressive of a divine calling or vocation. The word Church (ekklesia) and the role of naming in baptism indicate the fundamental place of calling in Christian life. However, ideas of vocation are difficult to access in a world shaped by the experience of disenchantment. The difficulties of articulating vocation are explored with reference to Weber, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard. These are further connected to a general crisis of language, manifesting in the degradation of political discourse (Arendt) and the impact of new communications technology on human discourse. This impact can be seen as reinforcing an occlusion of language in favour of rationality already evidenced in the philosophical tradition and technocratic management. New possibilities for thinking vocation are pursued through the biblical prophets (with emphasis on Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s reinterpretation of the call of Moses), Saint John, and Russian philosophies of language (Florensky to Bakhtin). Vocation emerges as bound up with the possibility of being name-bearers, enabling a mutuality of call and response. This is then evidenced further in ethics and poetics, where Levinas and Hermann Broch (The Death of Virgil) become major points of reference. In conclusion, the themes of calling and the name are seen to shape the possibility of love—the subject of the final part of the philosophy of Christian life: A Metaphysics of Love.


Author(s):  
Paul Stoneman ◽  
Eleonora Bartoloni ◽  
Maurizio Baussola

This chapter explores the factors that affect the firm’s decision to undertake product innovation. The discussion encompasses the driving forces that encourage product innovation, for example innovation by others or the ageing of an existing product line; however, the basic rationale is the search for profits. The chapter also addresses decisions about: the extent of innovation in general; horizontal and vertical product innovations separately; and the location of innovations in product space. The role of market structures in the product innovation decision, uncertainty in the innovating environment, and issues relating to emulation and copying are also addressed. Constraints to product innovation that survey data indicate are most important—innovation costs, risk and finance, and the availability of qualified labour—are also addressed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147787852110171
Author(s):  
Kei Nishiyama

While the discussion on education for deliberative democracy is increasingly gaining prominence, there is a deep gap between the theories of deliberative democracy and democratic education with respect to what deliberative democracy is and ought to be. As a result, theories and practices of democratic education tend to be grounded in a narrow understanding of the meaning of deliberative competencies, students’ deliberative agency, and the role of schools in deliberative democracy. Drawing on the latest theorization of deliberative democracy – deliberative system theory – this article aims to question and revise these assumptions. The article suggests that meta-deliberation is a key practice that can reconcile the gap between the two theories.


Author(s):  
Brian Joseph Gillespie ◽  
Clara H. Mulder ◽  
Christiane von Reichert

AbstractDrawing on survey data on individuals’ motives for migration in Sweden (N = 2172), we examine the importance of family and friends for return versus onward migration, including their importance for different age groups and in different communities on the rural–urban spectrum. The results point to a significant relationship between the importance of family and return versus onward migration, with family importance decreasing with age among returning migrants. At the same time, the importance of friends for returning increases with age. The findings did not suggest a significant relationship between urbanicity and returning versus migration elsewhere. Based on a subset of respondents who were employed prior to migrating (n = 1056), we further examined labor market outcomes for onward versus returning migrants. The results broadly indicate that return migrations are linked to lower likelihoods of labor market deterioration and improvement, suggesting greater labor market stability for return vis-à-vis onward migrations. However, the importance of family for returning (versus moving elsewhere) is associated with higher likelihoods of labor market deterioration and improvement compared with staying the same, indicating greater volatility in labor market outcomes when the importance of family is considered.


2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372097472
Author(s):  
Cristina Lafont

In this essay, I address some questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to this special issue on my book ‘ Democracy without Shortcuts’. First, I clarify different aspects of my critique of deep pluralist conceptions of democracy to highlight the core incompatibilities with the participatory conception of deliberative democracy that I defend in the book. Second, I distinguish different senses of the concept of ‘blind deference’ that I use in the book to clarify several aspects and consequences of my critique of epistocratic conceptions of democracy and their search for ‘expertocratic shortcuts’. This in turn helps me briefly address the difficult question of the proper role of experts in a democracy. Third, I address potential uses of empowered minipublics that I did not discuss in the book and highlight some reasons to worry about their lack of accountability. This discussion in turn leads me to address the difficult question of which institutions are best suited to represent the transgenerational collective people who are supposed to own a constitutional project. Finally, I address some interesting suggestions for how to move the book’s project forward.


2021 ◽  
pp. 186810262110186
Author(s):  
Patrik Andersson

Research confirms that China is becoming more engaged in the Arctic. However, international relations scholarship often extrapolates from relatively few instances of activity to wide-ranging claims about Chinese priorities. Fortunately, Chinese political discourse is organised by labels that allow us to study how the Arctic is classified and ranked along China’s other foreign policy priorities. This article analyses two such classifications – “important maritime interest” and “strategic new frontier,” exploring how they have come about, what they mean, and how they add political priority to the Arctic. It argues that hierarchies are constructed in two ways: by adding gradients and by including/excluding categories of priority. It views categories as performative: they not only convey information about character and relative importance of interests but are also used for achieving different objectives. By focusing on foreign policy classifications, the article contributes to a more nuanced and precise understanding of China’s Arctic interests.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R. Joslyn ◽  
Steven M. Sylvester

In this article, we examine the individual predictors that are responsible for accurate beliefs about the link between vaccinations and autism. We then show how these beliefs affect policy preferences about vaccines. We derive two hypotheses from motivated reasoning theory and test these on national survey data from Gallup and CBS News. Republicans were less likely to report accurate beliefs than Democrats. In addition, educational attainment modified the impact of party identification. The gap between Republicans and Democrats in likelihood of reporting accurate beliefs was largest among the most educated portion of the public. Finally, we show that accurate beliefs about vaccines, independent of statistical controls, are important predictors of policy attitudes about unvaccinated children attending public school and parental choice about the decision to vaccinate. We discuss the theoretical and practical significance of these findings.


1976 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 611-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Kimmel

Survey data on the personal career history and the history of the academic department with which they were affiliated are summarized for 33 women psychologist respondents. The results showed that women have played a role in the development of psychology in the South as program pioneers and leaders, as scientists, and, most notably, as mentors for other women.


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Ilott

This article uses readings of Mark Mylod’s Ali G Indahouse, Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block, and Chris Morris’s Four Lions to argue against a political trend for laying the blame for the purported failure of British multiculturalism at the hands of individual communities. Through my readings of these comic films, I suggest that popular constructions of “community” based on assumptions about cultural and religious homogeneity are rightly challenged, and new communities are created through shared laughter. Comedy’s structural engagement with taboo means that stereotypes which have gained currency through media and political discourse that seeks to demonize particular groups of young men (Muslims and gang members, for example) are foregrounded. By being brought to the forefront and exposed, these stereotypes can be engaged with and challenged through ridicule and demonstrations of incongruity. Furthermore, I suggest that power relations are made explicit through joking structures that work to include or exclude, meaning that the comedies can draw and redraw communities of laughter in a manner that effectively challenges notions of communities as discrete, homogeneous, and closely connected to cultural heritage. The article works against constructions of British Muslims as the problem community par excellence by using multicultural discourse to contextualize the representation of British Muslims and demonstrate how the discourse has repressed the role of political, social, and economic structures in a focus on “self-segregating” communities.


2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (02) ◽  
pp. 215-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
YOKO NIIMI ◽  
BARRY REILLY

This paper investigates the role of gender in remittance behavior among migrants using the 2004 Vietnam Migration Survey data. The gender dimension to remittance behavior has not featured strongly in the existing literature and our findings thus contain novel appeal. In addition, we use estimates from both homoscedastic and heteroscedastic tobit models to decompose the raw gender difference in remittances into treatment and endowment components. We find little evidence that gender differences in remittances are attributable to behavioral differences between men and women, and this finding is invariant to whether the homoscedastic or heteroscedastic tobit is used in estimation.


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